Model Taylor Tookes is Just Short

I'm short AND old.

Intrigue took hold of me as I clicked on this article about Taylor Tookes, a 5’1” model who is garnering an increasing amount of attention.

We all know it used to be that models had to be a certain height, as in tall. Lately we’ve seen them come in all shapes and sizes, but honestly hardly ever just outright petite.

I never quite understood why a model had to be so tall and skinny except it saved designers time and money on fabric and fittings. The average American woman currently wears a size 16 so that’s vastly outside of the range of your average supermodel.

When I was in high school I wanted to become a model for a brief time. My mother had attended modeling school and my oldest brother is a retired model. I was of course told that I was too short to even enter into a fashion show when I was 15 years old and I just put that whole idea aside afterward. Now, here I am several decades later, working the Amazon influencer ‘runway’ (my Amazon homepage) and the funny thing is that a couple of people I know had recently assumed that I am around 5’9” or 5’10” just from looking at my images. It’s gotta be these long (relatively speaking) boney legs of mine. Not bad for a small one standing at 5’1” I guess.

I’m not here to put myself down with references to my age and boney legs, but I do want to illustrate a point. Women are placed under so much pressure to look a certain way. We’re consistently told that we’re either too fat, too skinny, too black, too white -you name it. When I weighed about 60 pounds more than I do now, the fat comments never stopped. As soon as I dropped down to a weight proportional to my frame, and a size closer to my pre-corporate job era, someone had the nerve to tell me that I’m too old to weigh so little. Believe it or not these types of comments come from other women, not men.

What the comments tell me is that some women feel really bad about themselves and feel compelled to share the misery. The modeling industry, social media and societal pressure to look youthful, fresh and pulled together 24/7 has made plastic surgeons filthy rich and fashion designers deities. We all want to look good of course, but we can’t all the time and we won’t be young forever. I applaud Taylor Tookes for asserting herself in such a biased industry and I hope that we all can draw a little bit from her confidence and strength.